Luckily for all of us we learned from our early mistakes and incompetence and sprang back faster than Japan could handle.
Naval aircraft has traditionally been used for defending the Fleet while at sea and providing close air support for Marine landing forces. The vast majority of the Navy planes were sitting on the decks of the carriers that weren�t at Pearl Harbor during the attack.
Now...if they had just listened to Billy Mitchell 20 years earlier things might have been different.
